Page 35 of Hearts of Stone

He shot me a tired smile.

“And right now, seeing someone big, strong and hunky fall to their probable death is just what the doctor ordered.” He wriggled so he was sitting up straighter, widening his eyes deliberately before staring at the screen.

“Are we ever going to talk about this, Danny?” I asked.

“What do you want me to say?” He shot me a sidelong look, but only for a second. “I can’t explain something I don’t even understand myself, so what’s the point of talking about it?”

To share an experience, I thought. To have someone else, someone human and receptive and caring, hear about what you’ve gone through and hold your hand as you talk. I knew that because that’s what he’d done for me when my relationshipdied. But I also knew people didn’t talk about shit until they were ready and he wasn’t ready.

Daniel watched the Beast and Gaston fight it out without throwing popcorn at the screen and cheering Gaston on like he usually did. Instead, the bright colours of the screen were reflected on the surface of his eyes, the Beast’s fight replayed out in miniature.

“You were disappointed when the Beast transformed into a prince, right?” he asked me with a sly smile and I felt like I was seeing some of the old Daniel starting to return. “You wanted him to stay furry.”

“More than anything,” I admitted with a sigh.

“Dog fucker,” he said with a snicker.

“You pant after Gaston because he has biceps the size of his head,” I shot back.

“Pretty sure that means his dick is just as big. I mean Le Fou’s gotta be panting after him for some reason, right? Oh, shit, there he goes…” We both laughed as Gaston fell from the building, his arms and legs pinwheeling through the air as he fell into the crevasse below. “Right, I’m off to bed.”

Daniel grabbed a plush throw from the couch and wrapped it around him like a toga, somehow looking regal with it.

“But the beast is about to transform,” I said.

“I’ll let you have your little monster fucker moment all to yourself,” he replied with a wink. “And tomorrow, couture.”

“Puppies,” I countered.

“Couture and puppies!”

“Couture for puppies?” I asked and he just shook his head.

“Fine, but look, the monster is about to become a boring old man.”

He swept out of the room, leaving me to watch the end of the movie, but I had other ideas. I turned the movie off, the monster there nowhere near as compelling as the ones on the roof. Ishoved my hand in my pocket, pulling out those two stones, then rolling them around in my palm.

Each one was warm to the touch and the texture had me wanting to stroke my fingers across it. But touching them just had me remembering my own little monster story. I shoved them back in my pocket again and then got to my feet, slinking up the stairs to the first floor, then opened the door to the stairwell to the roof. Despite it being the middle of the day, the stairwell was dark, creepy looking, the whistle of the wind coming in through the vents setting my teeth on edge, at least until the point that I flicked on the light.

Then they were just stairs, just walls that were constructed before my grandmother was a child, just steps that took me up, up, up until I was back in front of the door that led out onto the roof. I paused in the doorway, no longer so bold now that Daniel wasn’t with me, but I took in one breath, then another, and forced myself to step out onto the walkway that ran across the spine of the roof.

The wind buffeted me, making me stagger towards the railing, but as I gripped it I realised it wasn’t so much the strength of what was actually a fairly gentle breeze, but rather that my muscle tension was locked down so tight that it hadn’t taken much to overbalance me. But as I clung to the railing and tried to get my arms and legs to relax, I saw him.

You know when you see someone on the street and their face seems so familiar, but you can’t place where you know them from? Like, did you go to school together? Were they a regular customer for a while? Were they a friend of a friend? You get that weird little niggly feeling inside your head until it comes to you who they are, hours or days later. Yeah, I didn’t need that long to determine where I’d seen this face before. The gargoyle grimaced at the grounds below, as if the rose bushes themselvesoffended him, but that stylised sweep of long hair, those knife cut cheekbones, those muscular shoulders.

Those bat-like wings…

This was Graven, the gargoyle from my dreams, and somehow he was crouched on top of my house.

I moved more nimbly now along the walkway, moving from gargoyle to gargoyle, peering at the face of each one, looking for the other one that I knew would be familiar. Carrick. I remembered it, felt it again. The way he touched me, the claws and the tips of each of his wings stabbing into the bed.

The feel of his pearls rubbing hard inside me.

My breath came faster and faster as the same feeling that I was having a psychotic break washed over me, and I slid down to sit against the fence railings. Pebbles, more pebbles littered the roof top and I found myself reaching for one. This one was a greenish grey and slightly smoother than the other two. I put that in a hollow I created in the hem of my shirt, grabbing more stones, more. Dark grey ones and others so light as to almost be white. Polished ones or one heavily pitted by the weather. I couldn’t explain what the hell I was doing, just that I needed to, and by the time I was finished, my shirt sagged low with the weight of all the pebbles.

Now what?I asked myself, knowing what I should be doing. I should’ve gone downstairs, used all that food in the fridge to whip up a meal that was warm and satisfying, because Daniel would no doubt wake up starving.

I didn’t do that.

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